


Crabeating

by Cryptovex



Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, Sex Work, Space Pirates, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:55:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28958295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cryptovex/pseuds/Cryptovex
Summary: Kavi would very much like to stop being a pirate, but the job won't let him go without a very high price.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

Kavi's date wasn't even trying to stifle his yawns anymore. Kavi pressed on anyway, hoping against hope to rekindle interest.

"...The trick to bribing customs agents: it's not you versus them, it's you _and_ them versus their boss. The job is incredibly dull, and they resent their boss anyway, so invite them on a little adventure. 'Officer, I have _no idea_ how ten million counterfeit naira wound up in my hold, or how a thousand very real ones wound up in your hand.' Put on a good show, give them the thrill of getting away with something, and you're fine. Even if the custom check's automated, the computers are usually old as hell, with plenty of known security vul-"

The avarak finished his drink and slithered away without so much as a fake number. Kavi didn't have high hopes for the date, arranged last-minute on a disreputable forum, but it was his fourth failure in a row. Maybe his storytelling wasn't as charming as he thought, and he came off as either a boring uncle or a tourist-trap narrator. Maybe he could no longer pretend he found piracy enticing.

Kavi sighed and checked his phone. 2:07 AM, not that that meant anything on a space station, drunk, with an encroaching case of timesickness. The only relevance was that last call was eight minutes away, at which point the bouncers would pull even fewer punches than usual. The few other patrons either drank and flirted like the night would never end, or wrapped up loose ends as quickly as their BAC would let them.

The bar was exactly the kind of scuzzy, smoky hole-in-the-wall romanticized in every pirate ballad. Sickly-sweet oil dripped from the unlicensed fuel depot upstairs. The bar collected it in buckets for its most popular drink, a corrosive cocktail of fluids never meant for ingestion. The carpet was soaked with enough spills and stains to make open flames more harshly banned than usual for a station. The place was utterly immune to gentrification, even if a corporation had any stake in a station light-years from anything they valued. Still, maybe a more standardized sort of awfulness wouldn't be so bad.

Kavi began the long trudge to Deck Nine. He didn't trust the look of the elevators, and zero-gravity made him nauseous enough while sober, leaving no choice but to walk up the full height of the station. It was a scenic route, at least. Each floor had a distinct identity, from the wall tapestries of Bunk Two to the neon cultivars of Hydroponics Five. He'd love to retire to a station like this, tending to a garden and offering advice on timesickness treatment. The only signs of his old life would be his tattoos, and most of the visible ones were either general spacer imagery or very obscure pirate references.

The _Flintlock_ sat alone on the dock, with a cluster of mechanics giving it a final inspection. Kavi passed just closely enough to hear their general tone - uneasy compromise, hemming and hawing, and reassuring each other that they did all they could and were legally off the hook. Kavi took the long way around to the hatch, running a hand over the glyphs on the battered hull - threats, boasts, desperate prayers to ancient gods of the void. The Crescent Suns' emblem had pride of place on the prow, an iridescent symbol of dread that the actual Suns would surely butcher them for stealing. He paused to admire the warp wyrm coiled around the engine casing with fangs splayed. It was a perfect match for the tattoo wrapping his left arm, marking a hundred light-years of FTL travel across a career. It was certainly a better reward than timesickness, but if he couldn't even use it to pick up guys anymore, he failed to see the point.

The main hatch sat on top of the ship, past bolted-on storage tanks and gnarls of solder residue. Kavi climbed the ladder, wincing at every groaning strut, and punched in the right access code on his third try. He stumbled down the stairs, mumbling thanks to whoever finally fixed the handrail. The humans' bunk was at the back of the ship, past the noxious fumes from the engine room and above the constant churn of hydraulics. Three of his bunkmates were asleep, one was AWOL, and one had just quit after an hour-long screaming match with the captain. Kavi slipped into his bunk as quietly as possible and rested on the cot designed for a subtly different species.

For the third time that day, Kavi opened his phone and checked his bank balance. No glitch or philanthropy had multiplied it tenfold. As always, he was a few million naira short of cashing out for good. He could easily borrow or embezzle that much, but either method would get his kneecaps smashed in short order. He could easily make it up by taking a few frontline roles on the next runs, but all of them were unacceptably risky or reprehensible. He closed his phone and settled into an uneasy timesick sleep, with hazy dreams of drifting endlessly in space.


	2. Chapter 2

The shrill pre-launch alarm woke Kavi after an hour or a day. He checked his phone as the safety announcements rambled on. 10:41 PM, a surprisingly short sleep at this stage of timesickness. He took a quick shower in lukewarm gray water and dissolved a rock-hard breakfast bar in a mug of weak tea. At least he felt reasonably awake, dodged a hangover, and had missed the asinine drama that always came at the end of shore leave.

Kavi remembered the captain announcing the _Flintlock's_ next route, but the details refused to be retained. He opened his phone, pre-emptively winced, and summoned VASCO.

"Good evening, [USER_KAVI]! How may I serve you today?"

Kavi, wishing VASCO had a text-only mode, mumbled, "Current route."

"We are on course to Port Samza to collect royalties and arbitrage commodities. ETA seventeen hours, with a top speed of 0.2 C. Would you like to see a map?"

 _Extort some marks and unload contraband._ VASCO, bless their heart, had no idea that the _Flintlock_ was anything other than a perfectly above-board cargo ship. They came bundled with the original chassis for free, an impeccable navigator compatible with nearly any plugin available. The one catch was their obligation to snitch on any illegal activity, which could not be removed without risk of utterly bricking them. Ever-adaptable, the _Flintlock's_ crew disabled their cameras, coined an elaborate code of euphemisms, and prays they never put two and two together.

"Show available jobs en route."

"Certainly! We have four open slots for mergers and acquisitions," _(boarding and pillaging,)_ "two for opposition research," _(hacking,)_ "three for R&D," _(forgery,)_ "and one for workplace morale." _(the Ship's Rag.)_

Kavi paused. He had taken a fair few shifts as the Ship's Rag throughout his career, for better or worse. Most of them were disappointing, with clients clueless about human anatomy or insistent on kinks that did nothing for him. Even the highlights left him underwhelmed with any other partners. Yet it had by far the best base pay of any nonviolent job. With one generous tip, he could leave free and clear. He might not get much business right after shore leave, but maybe some crewmates struck out as badly as he did.

"Register for workplace morale."

"Done! Report to the break room within two hours."

As Kavi swiped away VASCO's neon wireframe, he felt the first groaning rumbles of the engine. He quickly lay back in bed and strapped in as the roar filled his ears and resonated in his bones. Either the launch was rougher than usual, or he couldn't withstand it like he used to. Maybe the ship and his body were in a race to decay first. The roar subsided after a minute, and the grinding tension gave way to free-floating nausea as the ship left the station's artificial gravity. Kavi hastily popped two anti-nausea meds and taped down the few loose objects in his bunk. The ship spun up over the next few minutes, establishing its own gravity that was weaker but not sickeningly so. The worst side effects could be held at bay with an hour or two of exercise and not making yourself gratuitously dizzy.

Kavi took deep breaths and walked to the break room once the ship stabilized. He felt the tingly onset of a timesickness flare as the ship accelerated, but he was acutely aware of how to deal with minor episodes. A few common meds, in a wildly off-label combination and dosage, would smooth out the worst of it and give him a pleasant buzz that might come in handy as the Ship's Rag.

The break room was carefully positioned as far from noisy, explosive, or caustic zones as possible. It was decorated with, if not tasteful, an _eclectic_ mix of rugs, lamps, and art stolen from across the solar system. Kavi scrubbed himself thoroughly in the room's shower, the only one on the ship allowed to use anything better than gray water. He laid out a few of the most popular outfits to request - Iridium Fleet dress whites, a Third Space Race-era space suit, and Orion Dynasty court attire. The Dynasty costume made him smile - it was an anachronistic eyesore, and the iridescent plating easily chafed and overheated, but his favorite client was obsessed with it. He hoped Boxcutter was still alive and well on some icy moon, after leaving the crew with a billion stolen naira and going permanently off the grid.

Kavi clocked into his shift and lay back in bed, hoping for a quiet day of easy money. He set his phone down and picked up a book from the ship's library, volume six of the twelve-part pornographic saga _Inversion Festival._ Volumes one through three had permanently vanished from the library, volume five was almost fatally water-damaged, and volume ten was _spectacularly_ banned and existed only as fanmade speculation. The series' language was a century old, trying unevenly to imitate three-centuries-old slang, which combined with the dense plot threads and enormous cast to make it some of the most impenetrable porn ever written. Yet the structure and mood of the sex scenes shone through anyway, rewarding deep reads with a magnificent emotional palette. Kavi could understand about a third of it at best, and now stared blankly at the three words per page he could broadly understand. As he shelved it on the nightstand, his phone finally buzzed.

_**New client!** _

_**[USER_CRABEATER] has purchased [10] hours with you!** _


End file.
